


Listen Up, Kid

by shewhospeakswiththunder



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (see this IS actually holiday-inspired), F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Ghost Anakin Skywalker, Force Ghost Luke Skywalker, Force Ghost Obi-Wan Kenobi, Force Ghost Yoda (Star Wars), Ghosts of Star Wars Past, Snark, ancestral hassling, original poetry pretending to be canon poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-14
Updated: 2018-12-14
Packaged: 2019-09-18 09:04:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16992078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shewhospeakswiththunder/pseuds/shewhospeakswiththunder
Summary: The ghosts of Supreme Leader Kylo Ren's past are back to haunt him with a vengeance. A well-meaning, familial kind of vengeance.Or, A Star Wars Carol.For the prompt: Force ghosts hassling Rey and/or Ben (humour)





	Listen Up, Kid

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reyloise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reyloise/gifts).



Black anger burned in the pit of Kylo Ren’s stomach.

Shoulders hunched, he glared at the half-melted mask settled in its basin of ash in front of him and focused inward, stoking the embers of a charred rage that never died away completely. ‘The dark strength that feeds on fury is the truest and purest power’. Kylo snorted contemptuously at the mantra that his master had ground into him for years.

What a joke it all was.

That he, the new beacon of a burning legacy, should be sitting here in the dark, _broken_.

His old anger didn’t fuel him like it used to. It had been like a drum, pounding through him, opening him up to the dark side of the Force as its arcane energy eclipsed all else. In times past, nothing else had mattered but seizing the might that welled up in him and bending it to his indomitable will.

How different things were now.

Kylo almost didn’t notice the soft blue glow as it appeared in his periphery, absorbed as he was in his meandering thoughts but, when he did his head whipped around to face it.

A Force ghost.

He contemplated the figure in front of him, rallying to the forefront of his mind any information he could recall about physical manifestations of the Force. He didn’t recognize the man, but he was tall, his wavy hair almost shoulder length, with a slanting facial scar eerily similar to Kylo’s. Kylo knew that, although incorporeal, Force ghosts had incredible power.

The ghost silently regarded the notorious twisted piece of cast-plast before him, and his brows gathered in a frown.

Kylo decided to take the cautious route. “Who are you?” he asked, his voice hoarse from disuse.

“I’m your grandfather.”

Kylo fell silent, studying the ghost’s soft emission of cerulean light with a new intensity. He certainly was not what Kylo would have expected Darth Vader to look like, thinking the Dark Lord’s half-grin and kind eyes at odds with his infamous reputation.

“You took that a lot better than Luke did,” Anakin said, chuckling to himself. “That was my mask,” he continued, gesturing vaguely toward it. “If you’re waiting for it to speak to you, it won’t. It looks like the voice modulator melted.”

The bizarreness and jarring inconsistency of the situation, and the warm nature of his supposedly evil progenitor, left Kylo struggling to respond.

Left with no choice but to pick up the slack left by Kylo’s flabbergasted astonishment, Anakin said, “It looks like you haven’t taken _your_ mask off yet.”

Kylo shook his head in confusion. “What?” His helmet had been left little more than a splintered, sparking mess, abandoned in an elevator weeks ago.

“You’re the Supreme Leader now,” Anakin said, stepping closer.

“That’s right, I am.” Kylo heard the petulant pride in his voice, and also knew deeply how shallow and counterfeit that pride was.

“Seems to me that you took off one mask and out on another.”

He felt his eye twitch as his jaw clenched, a scalding shame washing over him. Even his dead grandfather knew what a sham he was. Again, there was nothing to say.

Anakin shook his head. “We’re alike, more than you know. Hot-tempered… dramatic, I’ve been told. Matching scars!” He pointed to his own with a wide grin. “You’ve managed to keep both of your hands though… for now,” he winked, and Kylo grimaced. “But, I also know what it’s like to want one thing so badly and then ruin it all, with no one to blame but yourself. I know what it’s like to let yourself fall into the darkness that everyone thought was inside you to begin with.”

The chair Kylo had been sitting in clattered backwards as he jolted upright, incensed, despising the tears now threatening to blur his vision.

“ _You_ were Darth Vader?” Kylo spat. “ _You?_ ”

“Yes. For all those years of emptiness and meaningless agony.”

“Suffering isn’t meaningless, it’s power,” Kylo recited, more from memory than conviction.

“That’s such a lie, Ben.”

“ _Don’t call me that!_ ” Kylo roared, his breathing ragged, chest heaving, fighting against the swell of emotions choking him.

“You’ll be worth nothing more than that mangled piece of _garbage_ right there if you deny your true self,” Anakin fired back, pointing at the warped remnant of his own evil. “You will become nothing.” Anakin looked back at him in pity. “There’s light in you, but you try so hard to fight it,” he said, more calmly. “Don’t pray to _me_ to help you kill it.”

And he vanished.

 

***

 

The rude blaring from Kylo’s alarm clock didn’t wake him. He hadn’t had even one blessed minute of rest throughout the entire night cycle, tossing and turning as his grandfather’s admonitions reverberated around his skull.

_You will become nothing._

Even as he trudged to the spartan ‘fresher attached to his living quarters to brush his teeth, the words hammered at his temples.

_You will become nothing._

Distractedly, Kylo went through the motions of his morning routine, but it wasn’t until he was brushing his left lower molars that he choked at the appearance of another ghost and liberally sprayed white paste on the mirror in front of him, speckling the glass with a messy constellation.

“What now?” Kylo groaned, after he finished spitting the remainder of the minty toothpaste into the sink.

This ghost was not his grandfather, but he was vaguely familiar.

“We never met, but your parents named you after me,” the ghost started.

‘Old Ben’, Han had called him in the days of Kylo’s childhood. His father would speak of the man with an equal measure of reverence and fondness, especially whenever he recounted the tale of how Han ‘almost single-handedly’ rescued Leia from the dastardly clutches of the Empire. _Obi Wan Kenobi_.

Kylo found it astonishing that he still had the capacity to be shocked, even after everything he had recently lived through, but Obi Wan’s arrival in his private quarters did just that.

“Do you know how Darth Vader died?” Obi Wan asked, with the intonation of a teacher.

“I assume Luke killed him. No one troubled themselves to tell me about it.”

“No,” Obi Wan replied, patiently ignoring the thinly veiled self-pitying in Kylo’s snarky answer. “He spared Vader, even when I told him it had to be done.”

“Luke, a total failure. What a surprise.”

“Your uncle loves you, Ben.”

“My _uncle_ tried to murder me in my _sleep!_ ”

“But he didn’t.”

“Well, not for lack of trying!” Kylo hurled his toothbrush unceremoniously into the sink and stomped out of the ‘fresher. Obi Wan followed.

“Luke went to confront Vader, but in the last second, decided not to take his life. He changed the fate of the galaxy by sparing his father’s life. Why do you think he did that?”

“He probably wanted to save all his murderous potential for his future nephew,” Kylo barked, aggressively tugging a black undershirt over his head.

Obi Wan remained silent, waiting. Kylo sighed in resignation and met the man’s benevolent gaze, wincing slightly at his kindly smile.

“Your uncle saved Darth Vader’s life because he heard the call of the light, even through the shadow of darkness. And he _listened_ to it.”

 

***

 

As Supreme Leader, Kylo was obligated to sit through the most monotonous finance meeting to have ever taken place in the entire history of the galaxy, and it did nothing to quell his foul mood. He seethed underneath his stony silence, a flimsy façade woven for the sake of the people seated around the large, reflective table. If he had known that ‘in charge’ would mean ‘financial responsibility’ and all that title entailed, perhaps he would have thought twice before slicing his predecessor in half.

“Never pegged you for a numbers kind of guy.”

Kylo flinched at the voice that sounded over his shoulder and whipped around to face yet another ghost from his past. Luke.

He stiffened in his uncomfortable chair at the head of the table, but quickly realized that none of the others present could see the luminous representation of the First Order’s former enemy. Despite his best efforts to remain still, Kylo couldn’t help but roll his eyes. _Of course_ , Luke would choose that exact moment to appear—a time and place in which Kylo had no choice but to sit quietly and listen to the _wisdom_ of his uncle. And Luke wasted no time capitalizing on the opportunity.

The old man placed a weightless, glowing hand on Kylo’s shoulder, causing him to flinch again. A thin sheen of sweat broke out on Kylo’s brow, but Luke did not remove his hand.

“I’ve made my mistakes, kid. I know that…”

Before he could stop himself, Kylo snorted in derision. Several heads swiveled to face him, glancing nervously at each other. He waved an impatient hand at them, gesturing for them to continue.

“…But it’s time we talked.” His uncle took a deep breath, as if trying to decide where to start. “Can’t you feel the _wrongness_ of it all? The imbalance?”

Unable to respond in any real way, without embarrassing himself in front of his subordinates, Kylo hunched his shoulders a little more and merely pretended to ignore him.

“There’s an emptiness in you, aching to be filled. I could always feel it in you.”

Kylo’s fists clenched.

“You’ve always felt that pull to the light. Something in you longs for it. Seek the balance, Ben. Go to your light.”

For the second time in as many days, the chair upon which Kylo had been perched fell backward with a startling bang as he shot to his feet. Abject fear painted the faces before him as a painfully tense silence hung in the air.

Storming out of the stuffy room, Kylo clearly heard behind him, “I _told_ you going over financials before lunchtime was a _bad idea_ , Karyn!”

 

***

 

It was the middle of the day cycle on the _Supremacy_ , which meant the corridors offered plenty of horrified witnesses to the Supreme Leader’s outburst, which took place in the middle of the hallway.

“ _How many more of you are there?!_ ”

A small group stormtroopers collectively skidded to a halt and ducked into the first bisecting corridor. Mouse droids skittered away along the polished metal floor and one frightened-looking petty officer sensibly followed suit.

Their hasty retreat left him alone with the ghost of Yoda, his diminutive form giving off the now familiar azure glow.

“Are you going to tell me about my _imbalance_ , too?!” Not waiting for an answer, he stalked away, continuing on his trajectory toward his quarters.

“Unpleasant company are we, young Solo?” Yoda called after him.

Kylo found no respite in his private rooms. When he burst in, Yoda was sitting contentedly on the edge of Kylo’s uninviting bed, his knobbly cane glowing beside him, short legs bouncing in the air in time to a song Yoda happily hummed to himself.

“Hard, this bed is. Sleep well, do you?” Yoda chimed, unaffected by the fiery glare Kylo aimed at him.

“Do I look like I sleep well?” he said, the words sharp but his voice brittle.

“No, young Solo. You do not.” Yoda said gravely. “A lover of poetry you are, though, and the written word.”

Kylo glanced at the small, angular desk that functioned as his work space. He had inadvertently left his calligraphy set out, and one piece of precious paper, upon which he had painstakingly copied out a poem from his datapad into Corellian hand-script.

“Much skill you have with written letters. A lost art, yes?”

“That’s none of your business,” Kylo grumbled as he clumsily tried to hide the evidence of his secret hobby.

“A _love_ poem, that one is!”

Still fumbling with the calligraphy set, Kylo spun around. “How do you—?”

“A poet much attuned to his darker nature, Asenec was. Grotesque, sinister, his works are. Just one poem about love, he wrote. Copied there, you have it.” Yoda pointed to the age-faded paper still out on the desk. “‘ _Is it my blood or yours that drips down this knife’s edge?’”_ he quoted.

Kylo was speechless, his eyes wide.

“Waiting for you, she is, young Solo.”

Any fresh ire ablaze within his breast was immediately extinguished.

“She left me,” he said, his voice wavering.

“Force you to go with her, she could not. Now, she waits.” Yoda cocked his head, examining Kylo.

“What do you want from me?” His deep voice broke, his chin trembling.

“What you want for yourself, the true question is. Decide that first, you must. Then act.” Yoda smiled warmly at Kylo, then faded into nothingness.

Too many thoughts and emotions writhed beneath Kylo’s skin, his stomach churning uncomfortably, but the heady thrum of a Force bond interrupted him before he could even begin to sift through them. The immediacy of millions of miles of consolidated space filled his senses, and Rey appeared before him.

She was caught mid-laugh, her nose scrunched endearingly and her eyes sparkling with humor, looking down at a source of entertainment invisible to him. Kylo’s heart flipped in his chest—her genuine warmth a beauty in itself. The sweet smile slipped as soon as she saw him, his own face wearing what he was certain must be a stupid look.

“Ben?” she whispered.

Nothing could have prepared Kylo for the fire that roared to life inside him at the sound of her voice. It wasn’t a fire born of rage or old pain, that raging blaze he was all too familiar with. This was new, and in less than a second it utterly consumed every festering resentment that marred his soul, every self-deprecating, self-destructive thought that scarred him. He couldn’t help but close the distance between them.

This was the fire of purpose, and he surrendered to it.

**Author's Note:**

> As a bonus, I wrote a poem to accompany this piece!
> 
> Excerpt from “The Gleam of Kiirium” by Asenec, from _The Despotica_
> 
> "Your Eyes are Twin Suns"
> 
> Your eyes are twin suns  
> and your lips cool rain
> 
> You are the giver and the gift
> 
> My hands are jagged shards of glass  
> and my mouth a black hole
> 
> I am a weapon
> 
> But is it my blood or yours  
> that drips down this knife’s edge?
> 
>  
> 
> [Asenec, the poet](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Asenec)
> 
>  
> 
> Several thanks are in order!  
> My husband, who is the comedian of the two of us. Couldn't have done this without him!  
> [@ms-camucia](https://ms-camucia.tumblr.com/) for her really cool meta on Ben's calligraphy!  
> And as always, my delightful beta, @colliderofhadron, for her amazing work!


End file.
